"What we hear repeatedly is companies want to make the customer experience proactive, not reactive," said Aaron Fulkerson, founder and CEO of MindTouch. "With contextual and personalized product knowledge plugged into all customer channels, you make advocates out of your customers well in advance of them needing reactive help to a specific problem. We believe MindTouch is the first company to offer product experience software. This is about a proactive customer success experience that stops customer problems before they occur."

MindTouch, the company that applies web, social and mobile software innovations to product help, serves a range of Fortune 1000 enterprises and small-to-medium enterprises with software to power product help experiences as a strategic initiative to improve customer support, customer retention programs, inform product strategy and become increasingly effective with content strategy.

Introducing the MindTouch LightSpeed Content Framework

This new MindTouch cloud-based software includes a web based self-service help center, in-product contextual help system, seamless integration with CRM and case management software like Salesforce, SAP OnDemand and Zendesk and with it come powerful performance enhancing features.

With the launch of this MindTouch platform comes the LightSpeed Content Framework, an ultra fast and easy to use, specialized content framework. Delivering multi-channel product help is now easier, faster and more effective than ever before. Content can be collaboratively authored in a web-based environment that allows subject matter experts from across the organization, or even external partners and customers, to contribute their knowledge seamlessly and rapidly without having to become experts in using an authoring tool. What is more, content within LightSpeed is dynamically organized to maximize discovery. For example, readers can browse linearly, across topics and are presented related knowledge paths to accelerate understanding.

Launching MindTouch HelpRank

MindTouch HelpRank is a collection of new proprietary algorithms that continuously optimize the customer help experience. By analyzing end user and support agent behavior across all customer channels, MindTouch HelpRank dramatically and continuously improves both search results as well as the organization of knowledge within the LightSpeed framework.

Now, for the first time, companies are able to quickly detect trends in customer support, help content, product experience and customer lifecycle and react immediately across all customer channels to improve customer experience.

Industry Perspectives On Growing Importance of Self Service Customer and Product Experience:

Growing importance of proactive customer care: 29% of enterprises are currently investing in proactive outbound communications according to the Forrsights Networks And Telecommunications Survey. In its recent report "Customers Expect Proactive Outbound Communication," Forrester's Kate Leggett wrote, "We predict that the range of channels for proactive outbound will increase, and will include service alerts, workarounds, customized cross-sell and upsell offers, and new knowledge base content."

Customer Impatience: 71% of customers require help within five minutes (nearly a third demand help immediately) states the LivePerson survey of more than 5,700 consumers in 6 western countries, which then goes on to show that 48% of these survey respondents said if they don't receive help within 5 minutes, they abandon the web site.

Revenue and economic impact: US enterprises lose an estimated $83 billion each year, reports folono, due to poor customer experience resulting in defections and abandoned purchases.

Corporate costs of poor social help: A survey of more than 1,400 customer care executives by CustomerServiceInTheCloud.com (a community of customer experience professionals) found that when social help fails, 40% of customers pick up a phone and call a company which costs $15 per call; 15% of customers go to an online chat session which costs $5 and 17% of customers send an email which costs $3.

Salesforce.com and MindTouch Announce Partnership: This video between MindTouch and Salesforce in the Fall of 2012 talks about how the two companies will work together to integrate products and the value that integration will bring to Salesforce customers.

MindTouch is revolutionizing the way companies deliver help and product content by applying a decade of innovation from web and social software to make customer support faster, easier and more satisfying. With MindTouch, consumers and support agents get the right answers faster. Collaboratively author or convert existing technical, help and product content into a two-way communication channel that increases self-service support, agent effectiveness and customer happiness. As a cloud delivered product, MindTouch can be deployed in a day and begin delivering value that same week. Millions use MindTouch every day. Great companies like SuccessFactors, Intuit, Paypal, Autodesk, Hewlett-Packard, Palm, HTC, RSA, SAP and EMC rely on MindTouch. Read more www.MindTouch.com.